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Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

Part Nine: A sudden change of direction for coastal military

Stewart Muir documents the true, untold story of The Vancouver Sun's stand, in 1942, against government censorship.

Photograph by: Roger Watanabe
, PNG

In 1942, The Vancouver Sun defied Canada’s wartime censors by publishing shocking allegations that alarmed the city and the nation. What came next resonates to this day. An untold true story from a time of fear, hatred and danger. To read all the instalments in the series, go to vancouversun.com/100years.

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The first visible sign of shifting policy came just two days after the final instalment of The Vancouver Sun’s inflammatory Derelict Defense series. On Wednesday, March 18, 1942 prime minister Mackenzie King told the House of Commons he was creating the new position of Supreme Defense Chief on the Pacific Coast, giving the officer authority over all three services for more effective coordination — just as Morley had urged in Part Two of the series on March 14.

The Sun took to this apparent vindication of Alan Morley’s articles as if it had won a prize, editorializing that the “supreme duty of defending our coast falls now upon General R.O. Alexander, who is well able to bear it.”

Alexander is pictured on the front page staring forcefully at a tabletop display, shielding his shot-up left hand, the most visible of his ailments.

In fact, the appointment was a sham, intended purely to increase public confidence. Only Alexander’s job title changed.

All the same, it was a sign that Ottawa had been listening.

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In an editorial published the day after its controversial series was halted by press censors, The Sun had challenged Ottawa to lay bare the “bewildering clash of views” that had emerged in the Pacific defence debate.

Those in elected offices felt intense public pressure from British Columbians to defend against an enemy attack on home soil.

The military did not see the need to do much because the Japanese did not pose a serious threat and resources were badly needed to defend Britain and defeat the Nazis.

The two points of view could not be further apart.

As The Sun put it, “Until this question is answered, until the government knows what it is preparing for, there can be no satisfactory defense plan.”

Even as The Sun was writing this, the question was, in fact, being decided.

On March 16, the same day as the third and final Derelict Defense instalment, Canada’s top general drew up a plan to mobilize forces within two existing army divisions.

Cabinet adopted Gen. Kenneth Stuart’s plan two days later. He would later return with more plans to create an entirely new division specifically for the west and these too were approved.

Morley’s articles were not merely well timed. They defined the exact dividing line between two distinct phases of defence readiness. An official military history unsealed 40 years after the war singled out the Derelict Defense series as one of the “indirect causes” for the strengthening of forces on the Pacific coast.

The nation learned of the new plans one week later on March 25, when Mackenzie King revealed them to Parliament. That day, King was feeling uplifted and powerful. He had stayed in bed a long time between sleep and wakefulness, listening to a waltz on radio and replaying in his mind the flaming dream of Elliot Jacks.

The Vancouver businessman’s vision of King standing on a balcony with burning buildings on either side, finally, 11 days since the first letter from Jacks, made sense to King. Vancouver was on one side and Halifax on the other, both coasts of Canada bracing for enemy attacks.

The thought gave the famously spiritualist prime minister a lift that carried him through the day.

The ensuing surge brought the army from 1,200 men in early 1942 to 35,000 in little more than a year.

Nearly 50 air force squadrons were added to Western Canada, half for B.C.

Calculations suggest an escalation like that would easily cost upwards of $10 billion today.

B.C. entered a state of frenzied preparation as the equivalent of billions of dollars in military spending was unleashed.

The province — both coastal and inland — became an armed camp as battalions were mobilized and trained. Troops began carrying gas masks, coastal gun batteries were hardened up against low-flying enemy aircraft, and inventive schemes were launched, including an armoured, gun-mounted patrol train between Prince Rupert and Terrace.

The buildup has been well documented. But the contentious point remains of why it took place. Conventional wisdom has it that the surge was unnecessary. The classic explanation, which has not been challenged, dates to 1970. “Cabinet listened to the frightened voters of British Columbia instead of to its military advisers,” wrote war historian C.P. Stacey, “with the result that great numbers of men, great quantities of material and many millions of dollars were wasted in accumulating on the west coast which were not needed there and whose presence there would have no possible useful effect upon the course of the war.”

The assumption was that King acted for purely political reasons, in particular to ensure a coming plebiscite on conscription would win support in British Columbia.

By co-opting the military establishment to help him, the story goes, he saved his own government.

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